I've just come home and found that my Davis Vantage Vue weather station is displaying the message 'LOW BATTERY TRANSMITTER 1'. It's been very warm and sunny today, so I'm surprised that this message has come up. This message has come up before but I can't remember how long it takes for the battery to run out and if it isn't a very long time till it runs out, do I need to get a new battery fast? Or, can I wait a few days before I need to get a new battery?

The solar charges the supercap.
The super cap runs the ISS but can't run it all night if the night is long or its charge is low (little sun for days).
The remainder of the time the ISS is run from the battery. The battery is not rechargeable.
So, when the battery runs out, there is a period where the ISS won't run just before sun rise and the solar gets going again.

So, change the battery a soon as practical. The warning is a 'low' warning, not a 'dead' warning so there is a little leeway.

If the battery runs out again quickly then the supercap/solar need to be checked as the battery should last some years depending on the amount of sun at the location.

I've just come home and found that my Davis Vantage Vue weather station is displaying the message 'LOW BATTERY TRANSMITTER 1'. It's been very warm and sunny today, so I'm surprised that this message has come up. This message has come up before but I can't remember how long it takes for the battery to run out and if it isn't a very long time till it runs out, do I need to get a new battery fast? Or, can I wait a few days before I need to get a new battery?

Thanks in advance,

William

Hi William,
I have changed my battery 3 times in 4 years, when you change the battery you will need a lithium type I purchased an "Energizer" lithium number 123.
Cheers
Brian

Now I know that the battery is a Energizer Lithium 123 battery, I can easily get that from a local shop.

Also, now I know that I can wait several days before this becomes a problem, that means I can get the battery not so quickly as I thought and that the battery was last changed about 1 year ago, so I know the supercap/solar is fine.

Somehow overnight, the message has dissapeared and has been replaced with 'LUNAR ECLIPSE 25.04' so does that mean my battery isn't low anymore or is it because the Davis Vantage Vue Console can't display two messages at once?

1. Genuine but premature low battery issue, apparently due in most cases to moisture tracking across a set of gold contacts on the rain/battery PCBA, which then runs down the battery. This has been fixed in more recent revisions, but there is a retrospective fix which is crude but effective - just requires smearing some special insulating grease across the contacts to prevent the tracking. (There is also a small subset of genuine battery issues apparently caused by a supercap fault. The Vue main PCBA is potted and so there's no way of seeing or replacing the supercap. In general, this should ensure that the PCBA and supercap have a long service life, but in rare instances the supercap may have suffered latent damage during manufacture. This issue really is quite uncommon though.)

2. Spurious low battery warnings, apparently caused by two factors. One is that the ISS warning flag can seemingly be triggered by a very brief and transient low voltage (perhaps when the unit is switching from one power source to another), but once triggered, the console warning will then not reset automatically until midnight on the day of occurrence. The other is that the original low battery warning is very sensitive - arguably too sensitive. In the Rev F Vue the ISS low battery threshold was lowered from 2.8v to 2.0v. Also, as of console firmware revision 2.14, the time threshold over which an ISS low battery flag needed to be seen was extended to 2 minutes before triggering the console warning.

So, on older Vue stations, there were various reasons why an ISS low battery can be seen, but on more recent models this problem should largely have been eradicated.

prodata wrote:There have been two kinds of low battery issue with the Vue:

1. Genuine but premature low battery issue, apparently due in most cases to moisture tracking across a set of gold contacts on the rain/battery PCBA, which then runs down the battery. This has been fixed in more recent revisions, but there is a retrospective fix which is crude but effective - just requires smearing some special insulating grease across the contacts to prevent the tracking. (There is also a small subset of genuine battery issues apparently caused by a supercap fault. The Vue main PCBA is potted and so there's no way of seeing or replacing the supercap. In general, this should ensure that the PCBA and supercap have a long service life, but in rare instances the supercap may have suffered latent damage during manufacture. This issue really is quite uncommon though.)

2. Spurious low battery warnings, apparently caused by two factors. One is that the ISS warning flag can seemingly be triggered by a very brief and transient low voltage (perhaps when the unit is switching from one power source to another), but once triggered, the console warning will then not reset automatically until midnight on the day of occurrence. The other is that the original low battery warning is very sensitive - arguably too sensitive. In the Rev F Vue the ISS low battery threshold was lowered from 2.8v to 2.0v. Also, as of console firmware revision 2.14, the time threshold over which an ISS low battery flag needed to be seen was extended to 2 minutes before triggering the console warning.

So, on older Vue stations, there were various reasons why an ISS low battery can be seen, but on more recent models this problem should largely have been eradicated.

Hi prodata,

Thanks for your very informative reply.

My Davis Vantage Vue, was set up on 20/07/2011. Does this mean that is an new model or an old model?

William Grimsley wrote:Either Cheadle Hulme is very sunny or you're just lucky because as mermaidbeachweather said, he has replaced his Davis Vantage Vue battery 3 times in 4 years! Not a year. More like 1 1/2 years.

I can assure you William that Cheadle Hulme isn't sunnier than where you are. I'm near Manchester making it impossible!

I have the VP2 and you and Mermaid Beach have the Vue. That's the difference.

William Grimsley wrote:My Davis Vantage Vue, was set up on 20/07/2011. Does this mean that is an new model or an old model?

There have been a number of revisions to the Vue since it first came out, starting with Rev A (surprise, surprise) and currently on Rev MD, last time I looked. If you have a single letter at the start of the Mfg Code then that will be the Rev level. If you have two letters (which happened as from Rev MA) then that's the Rev level.

(This rather disguises when more major changes were made. Davis regard anything from from Rev A to Rev F (I think it was, but don't quote me) as v1.00. Rev G was v1.05 (about May 2012), which made some important internal modifications to the Vue ISS. And then there was a jump to Rev MA which was v1.10 (about Dec 2012).

Then, separately from the hardware revision, there's the console firmware revision level. You can update the firmware yourself (with care!) via a download from the Davis site. v2.14 contained the change to the low ISS battery warning. The current revision level is v3.00 for the Vue. NB I don't recommend updating the firmware unless there's a real need to do so - there is a real risk of things going wrong or not behaving as you expect.